Consciousness is not limited to our physical existence because we have a soul that transcends the material world

I believe we evolved communication to help our tribes. "Sabertooth lion over there!" "those berries give you mad gas, bro!" "hey, let's try to be civil with the neanderthals"

And so, we're wired to believe what people say, especially the ones who appeal to our hopes and fears. It takes conscious effort to doubt a good storyteller.

And such is religion.

I don't really dislike or get offended by any of the interviewee's thoughts here, but the older gentleman is very well reasoned, logical, and cool about it while also being conscious about the potential for misunderstandings that can be avoided if we know a little history.

This is why I don't feel self-conscious about looking both ways before proceeding through a green light.

That was cute...

That reminds me of my kid at that age...just one long run on sentence that never really seems to have a break and flows from one stream of consciousness to the next eventually building to what you believe will be the dramatic finale but really is just an involuntary gasp triggered by an oxygen starved brain that once replenished resumes its partnership with the mouth to bring on a fourth act soliloquy of just how awesome My Little Pony is and oh don't you love that new pony sunset shimmer sparkle fart?

No no no, being inspired by her, by itself, is indeed less offensive than being inspired by Hitler, the consequences are less dire.

But having the gall to admit publicly that you are inspired by her unconditionally is equally as bad as .. substitute Adolf where applicable.

By doing either you admit to be a self-conscious antisocial asshole.

I understand that reading her book can accidentally shove you in a better direction than before, and that is very unlikely in the other scenario, I give you that.

I was inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Che Guevara for what thats worth :-)

So a general all-encompassing nod to her is just like a general nod to any evil. And you dont get out of that by quantifying evil and making it relative.

Yes, according to some, they are the same, which is incredibly disrespectful to Bernie's actual victims.

People who have consciously decided to disconnect their brain from their words and actions are rapidly multiplying, and I fear that itself could end civilization as we know it. Civilization cannot exist without the ability to distinguish one thing from another, something being advocated against.
I'm flabbergasted.

The video is right that pretty much the number one most important question is the weight of the truck (basically tare weight, which is actually the tractor plus empty trailer). When I watched the announcement, I thought Musk was slightly cagey about that, but I thought that he said that it would be in the ballpark of a normal ICE semi. Guess I should watch again.

I think Musk made some semi-optimistic predictions about battery tech improvement and economy of scale. Frankly, I think he's earned the right to be semi-bold with his predictions, given his and Tesla's track record (paying off govt. loan very early, single handedly pushing forward battery tech and production, etc. etc.). His optimistic predictions have a tendency of panning out.

The average American is never going to switch to an electric car purely or even largely for "green conscious" reasons. The switch will happen when the electric car is better than the ICE alternatives in concrete metrics like performance, reliability, and operating cost. Musk is pushing that date forward at an incredible pace. Arguably it is already true for many use-cases at the high price-point range of the Model S, but that price point limits the scope of the impact quite a bit. He knows that to really shake things up, he's got to get that price point down, and he knows that to do that he's got to improve the economy of scale on battery tech. Which he's doing by expanding it into adjacent markets like home batteries, etc.

I think he deserves a lot of credit for "walking the walk" when it comes to working hard to protect/improve the environment, as opposed to Al Gore et al. "talking the talk".

If you don't know who Matthew Silver is:

"My role as a clown, trickster and village idiot is to parody excessive seriousness by playing with taboos, rules, and social norms. My inspiration comes from my heart. I perform for smiles and laughter, loosening people’s armor, and opening up a portal for imagination, creativity and love.

Some people see me as a raving lunatic, pompous “artistic” hipster, or attention-starved 9 year-old, but people don’t consciously understand the role of a clown in society. Read between the lines and you will start to see things from a different perspective. By breaking down boundaries, I provide you, the viewer, with permission to open your mind and realize it’s okay to act silly from time to time. We may trick ourselves into believing we know everything, constantly striving for perfection in a society that requires a civilized, job-holding, serious individual. We cannot be perfect. If we allow ourselves the chance to be flawed perhaps we can let the obstacles humble us, rather than make us rigid. In the end we can let our guards down to attain our most basic need of giving and receiving love."
http://www.maninwhitedress.com/?page_id=2

I don't know, it seems pretty arbitrary to me either way. Actually the best argument for it IMO is that if you only have sex with one person, you aren't going to know if it's good or terrible. You won't have anything to compare it to and therefore something to make your life more unhappy if you think it's bad; one less issue to divorce for as well. Similarly, maybe if you were poor and couldn't afford fancy food, consciously avoiding ever trying the things you couldn't regularly afford so you would never be unhappy with not having it. It would be a question in the back of your mind, but not a source of unhappiness.

It would also have been nice to have some interview questions about how the sons are taught and treated by the same parents.

I think it's an ugly necessity.

Equality isn't about treating everybody the same. I mean, I wish we could do that, but then I wish people wouldn't decide if they are going to hire somebody from their very first glance. But that's what we do. We do nothing and we simply allow our unconscious bias to rule our decision making which, in most cases, would be great for somebody like me.

I mean, I don't like it. I can understand entirely why people feel they have been cheated when somebody gets a job or promotion ahead of them just for the sake of ticking a diversity checkbox. Maybe you're right, maybe it is just adding energy to that pendulum, but then a pendulum without resistance swings forever. I hope conscious decisions to readdress imbalanced caused by unconscious bias works more as a dampening effect, as resistance.

Back to semantics. Like the woman in the video, I probably had quite a knee-jerk response to men's rights. Sometimes probably warranted, but then some feminists have some pretty dumb things to say as well. Anyway, the person that helped changed by mind about it was a woman and a feminist. Don't define a group by it's most extreme edges because I think it just leads you to make uncharitable judgements about people that identify as part of that group before you've even really listened to them.

Hmm. I disagree with your description text, @ChaosEngine.

I've never shot something fully-automatic. I have shot an AR-15 semi-automatic, and I know where you're coming from when you say that hitting a target on full auto would be difficult, especially for a relatively untrained person (recoil control).

However, I think Vox and others are basically correct when they say that this modification (bump stock) contributed to the Las Vegas shooting being so deadly. Specifically in that sort of scenario.

The dude wasn't picking targets and sniping, going for accuracy. He picked an ideal shooting location (elevation with clear LOS) and sprayed into a crowd. He'd have been more accurate by keeping the weapon on semi-auto and actually aiming carefully, and certainly would have gotten more hits per bullet fired, but on the other hand the rate of fire difference would have so different that people would have had more time between shots to scramble for cover, etc.

He had position, an abundance of bullets, and lots and lots of time. Given those givens, having a rate of fire approximately equal to fully-automatic means a much higher body count than if he'd have been limited to traditional semi-auto.


The NRA is being more cunning than I figured they would, and has come out in favor of banning bump stocks. I agree with you that they see that mostly as a pointless concession, and a distraction from additional / better stuff that needs to happen.

But it isn't a pointless concession. If banning fully-automatic firearms in 1986 (minus the ones grandfathered in) was the right thing to do, extending that to include bump stocks is also the right thing to do. For the same reasons.

@newtboy is correct to note that technically, a rifle with a bump stock isn't a fully-automatic "machine gun". The user's finger still pulls the trigger once for every bullet that comes out -- semi-automatic.

However, I think that the "spirit" of the distinction is that with semi-automatic firing you have to think and consciously decide to pull the trigger each time you want to shoot a bullet, whereas with fully-automatic you consciously decide when you want to start and stop shooting. By the letter of the law, weapons with bump stocks are semi-automatic. But by that definition of the "spirit" of the law, they are fully-automatic. Pull the grip/barrel forward to start shooting, pull it back to stop.

It's a pretty frequent occurrence for technology to outpace the law. The definitions of semi vs fully automatic include the word "trigger" because they didn't anticipate this kind of conversion that makes the trigger sort of one step removed from the conscious decision to fire. The law would have similar hiccups if a weapon was developed that used a button or switch to fire, rather than a traditional trigger.

When those hiccups happen, the solution is to clarify the intent of the law and expand or clarify definitions as necessary. I'm pleasantly surprised that many legislators seem willing to do that with bump stocks, and that the NRA seems like it won't stand in the way. Mission accomplished, situation resolved? No. But a step in the right direction.

"I referred to the modern nazi who supports them"

Fair enough.

"It's not just a belief, it's a desire to exterminate, alienate and persecute an ethnic group. "
Agreed. That desire should not be considered an acceptable point of view. But there's a big gap between saying expressing a desire and carrying out an action.

"This implies that you think being 'nicer to Hitler' (i.e. not solved it with violence) would have gotten rid of them yet you contradict this later on."
No, I don't believe that. Hitler was in power, he had an army and he was already committing genocide. At that point, violence is your only recourse to stop the atrocities.

But yes, ultimately, if someone had been able to take Hitler aside BEFORE all the horrors of WW2 and been able to convince him to lay off the genocide, wouldn't that have been a better solution?

There are absolutely times when violence is the best course of action, but it ALWAYS represents a failure to resolve differences.

"I'm just saying if a nazi happens to get punched, on balance, it's probably ok."

I'm certainly not going to shed any tears over it and being completely honest, part of me relishes it. But intellectually, I know it's a) not a sustainable solution and b) it's a juvenile response.

"It's a bit like trying to 'defeat' religion. If you stamped out any sign of all religions in the world, all the imagery and documents and let's say memories too. Before long, religions would form because the human brain is drawn to those ideologies"

Completely agree. Put enough humans together and they form tribes and ascribe bad things to "the others". What saves us is the ability to learn from past mistakes as a civilisation, and even then we're REALLY slow learners.

But we have made progress.
Going from right to left, I would bet that even most Nazis think women should be able to vote; the vast majority of conservatives view racism as abhorrent (at least, consciously) and "Middle America" has mostly come around to gay rights.

"Defeated" might be the wrong word here. I want Nazism to become as laughable a philosophy as flat earthers. Espousing it should be met with the same response as someone who claims thunder is the gods playing football.

" TL;DR sorry for the wall of text, ignore me"

Don't apologise... it's an interesting discussion.

If he really received those orders from his supervisor then it's pretty scary still that this fuckface did not have the common sense/decency to question that order when it was obvious the nurse was following protocol but was also stuck between policy & navigating an unfamiliar situation.

I sentence the pig to 6 months in a mental health facility and 2 DMT injections a week to diffuse his ego & expand his consciousness (and maybe he goes to hell once or twice).